$60 billion for two years worth of shots? Sounds like a steal. Covid has cost the global economy Trillions and Trillions of dollars already, and all the downstream costs will probably add up to $100 trillion real dollars when factoring in inflation, money printing, national debt, state/provincial debts/local debts/consumer debt increases.
The costs of the pandemic are one side. The other is the cost of developing and producing the vaccines. In a normal market situation, prices are determined by supply and demand. But that's really not such a situation here. The question from the government's point of view has to be whether you could have had the vaccine cheaper. After all, large sums of money have already been invested by the states for research and d…
The answer to this is emphatically no.
Countries that paid more per-dose got vaccines earlier. Manufactures are producing vaccines as fast as they can, but there's still unfilled demand for over 5 billion more doses. And in low-income countries which can't afford to pay as much, even today only 1.1% of the population has been vaccinated so far...